st pair of legs.
He will there see what I see: the bare skin, quite as fine as under the
neck, but covering a much larger surface. The horny breast-plate offers
no wider breach. If the Philanthus were guided in her operation solely
by the question of vulnerability, it is here certainly that she ought to
strike, instead of persistently seeking the narrow slit in the neck. The
weapon would not need to hesitate and grope; it would obtain admission
into the tissues off-hand. No, the stroke of the lancet is not forced
upon it mechanically: the assassin scorns the large defect in the
corselet and prefers the place under the chin, for eminently logical
reasons which we will now attempt to unravel.

Immediately after the operation I take the Bee from the Philanthus. What
strikes me is the sudden inertia of the antennae and the mouth-parts,
organs which in the victims of most of the Hunting Wasps continue to
move for so long a time. There are here not any of the signs of life to
which I have been accustomed in my old studies of insect paralysis: the
antennary threads waving slowly to and fro, the palpi quivering, the
mandibles opening and closing for days, weeks and months on end. At
most, the tarsi tremble for a minute or two; that constitutes the whole
death-struggle. Complete immobility ensues. The inference drawn from
this sudden inertia is inevitable: the Wasp has stabbed the cervical
ganglia. Hence the immediate cessation of movement in all the organs of
the head; hence the real instead of the apparent death of the Bee. The
Philanthus is a butcher and not a paralyser.

This is one step gained. The murderess chooses the under part of
the chin as the point attacked in order to strike the principal
nerve-centres, the cephalic ganglia, and thus to do away with life
at one blow. When this vital seat is poisoned by the toxin, death
is instantaneous. Had the Philanthus' object been simply to effect
paralysis, the suppression of locomotor movements, she would have driven
her weapon into the flaw in the corselet, as the Cerceres do with the
Weevils, who are much more powerfully armoured than the Bee. But her
intention is to kill outright, as we shall see presently; she wants a
corpse, not a paralytic patient. This being so, we must agree that her
operating-method is supremely well-inspired: our human murderers could
achieve nothing more thorough or immediate.

We must also agree that her attitude when attacking, an attitude
very